The Kindness Project

Being nice always seemed unreachable, but then this self-described mean girl decided to save herself

One thing that is very interesting about kindness," says psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, "is that in any given situation, one mostly knows what the kind act is. It's very rarely a dilemma about what one should do."

I've called the renowned British intellectual and self-help guru for the educated set at his London office, ostensibly as research but really because I need therapy.

His soothing BBC-accented voice falls like rain on a parched desert. It's been over a year since I began my kindness project, a lurchingly followed regime to let my awareness of others' needs influence my behavior and actions. I was hoping I'd have enough practice in this previously uncharted territory to make it through the holidays with my family without a single mean outburst, but that was looking increasingly doubtful.

I have a long history of being challenged at being kind. My first real boyfriend—I was a senior in high school, he was a college dropout—used to leave me notes signed, "Be kind, my sweet." Here's just one of the reasons he might have chosen this message for me: To commute to his bike-messenger job, he had to take a shuttle van that cost a dollar. Every Friday, he would ask to borrow the fare, and I would refuse, ranting that he shouldn't make me the person who would decide, by my generosity or lack of it, whether or not he would get to work.

Be kind. It sounds so simple, but it's something that, as my boyfriend's notes evinced, I did not have a handle on. For many years, I avoided the issue, although I knew it was there. We all struggle to be kind, unless we are sociopaths. After I'd behave poorly—as Phillips notes, I always knew what I was doing—I might have a shame hangover, but I was never entirely repentant. I was more comfortable with what seemed truer: fury, mistrust, envy. My husband often tells me, whenever I refuse to be sympathetic to the financial and emotional travails of his mother, that I am like one of the mean characters in Jane Austen, the ones who make their poor relatives live in frigid rooms in the unused wing of the house. "They add the color to the stories!" I respond. I even set up my adult life first in L.A., then in New York, two American cities where assholes are most likely to get a pass, particularly if they're witty.

But recently, those old words be kind in pencil in my ex's elegant script began floating up almost as a vision, and with some frequency. I found myself no longer able to let myself off kindness's insistent, poking hook so easily. I seem not to be alone in this; the question that has been plaguing me has also burbled into our national consciousness in a slightly different form: How did everything get so ugly, materialistic, and out of human scale? Shouldn't we reassess our social values now that the economy has imploded, proving that this system isn't working so well (and who, other than the filthy rich, really enjoyed the soul-depleting, borrowed-cash spending in the boom part of the cycle)? Last spring, Time magazine's cover announced, "The End of Excess: Why this crisis is good for America." Inside, Kurt Andersen, the journalist and NPR personality, wrote that "we are making the shift...from an unfettered zeal for individual getting and spending to a rediscovery of the common good...."

Kindness is, by definition, about being good to other people, with its roots in the Old English gecynd, meaning "of the same nature." As we've suddenly all become so much more vulnerable, in our jobs and our houses and even as a world power, the anxiety over whether we should help one another, or whether we even know how, has fixated us. It's at the core of the healthcare debates; it's probably why we became so instantly attached to Glee, the Fox show about a Midwestern high school glee club. We like the musical numbers, but we also live vicariously through the underlying central conflict—Mean versus Meek— because it's our own. We hung on the incident of Kanye West telling Taylor Swift that Beyoncé should have won the MTV video award instead, not because, as Kanye later copped, it was rude, but because it was so unkind. And it seemed to deeply affect West's sense of himself going forward: "I need to, after this, take some time off and just analyze how I'm going to make it through the rest of this life, how I'm going to improve," he told Jay Leno. Even Kanye is on the kindness project!

It seems there's a real fear that we've veered too far off course from a country where, in the Depression, people barely making it helped feed those not making it all. Or so we nostalgically tell it. There's a fear that we've become remedial at kindness.

Whatever the bigger picture, I needed to change the self-portrait; I was tapped out on my own meanness. It's exhausting constantly fighting, harboring resentments, measuring my own share, getting more of a high from a new purchase than from human connections. My mantra was "Admit it! Admit it!" I couldn't rest until people who had injured me acknowledged their terrible faults. That this was experienced as a punishment by the recipients of my displeasure never occurred to me, so focused was I on my own wounds. A loved one paraphrased Nietzsche to express his frustration with me: "Distrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong." It haunted me because it was so true.

But the problem was that if I gave up this mode of being, I didn't know how else to be. Being nice seemed annoying and fake— how could I have a real relationship with people if I couldn't mix it up with them? And how could I deal with modern society, with everyone else's thoughtlessness and selfishness, if I didn't indulge my own?

I asked my corporate branding semiotician friend A. S. Hamrah about kindness. "Well, I know when it officially died," he said. "In the mid-'90s, when people started putting those bumper stickers on their cars that said PRACTICE RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS AND SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY. Here's a stranger, passive-aggressively telling me what to do to another stranger, on a bumper sticker."

The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation is now a 501(c)3 nonprofit. It supports World Kindness Week (November 9 to 15). It's funny, but also a real problem. Now that kindness is a brand—either proselytized by boomers urgent to reclaim (or monetize) their moribund '60s ideals, or deployed as an Orwellian motto like "Because we care" by banks who still charge you $34 overdraft fees on a $10 purchase—it's become marginalized. In yet more evidence that we live in a post-kindness society, there is an organization based at the UC Berkeley campus called the Greater Good Science Center that researches, among other things, how kindness is beneficial to our health. A new book, The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness, has scientists discussing these studies. Although such efforts are well-intentioned, the fact that we might have a need for them and imagining who gravitates toward them (flakes, phonies, and bores) drives me to misanthropy. The kindness movement seems like a racket, so I have embarked on my own program.

My first experiment: being more receptive and giving to my neighbors, a big challenge because I live on a Brooklyn block that is soul-crushingly dowdy. There it is. I know it sounds mean and insanely snobby. When we moved in, with the exception of a few people, no one was very welcoming, and dowdy and rejecting is a hard-to-forgive combo. Maybe their attitude derived in part from my loudly lamenting how ugly our street was.

But last summer, someone spearheaded a block party. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was the first one in 20 years. They used to do it annually, when there were no fences between the backyards. Here was my chance. The new me volunteered to head up the potluck dinner—I rented the tables and chairs, sent cajoling e-mails, dropped off flyers for the elderly, orchestrated the block kids to paint cans for the hydrangea table arrangements, planned, and obsessed. I extended myself to my neighbors, who, by most accounts, had a good time. And yet I just couldn't get over my endemic disappointment and urge to punish. Why did no one else care whether we had locally grown food? Why did people insist on using disposable plates and cups, creating bags of garbage needlessly? Why did they sit down to eat before the flowers were on the tables? Why did they complain that the tables were too far down the block? "You try carrying six-foot fold-up tables," I muttered. I wanted to never deal with these people again.

Everett Collection

Why was it so hard for me to retain the love over the hate?

There was an "aaaaaaaah" quality to finding Adam Phillips' and historian Barbara Taylor's lovely, compact treatise On Kindness, published last summer. In a mere 114 pages, it covers kindness's role in the development of Western politics and intellectual thought, as well as its psychoanalytic underpinnings, explaining how it figures into our individual and collective development. I've marked up that book like an eager born-again teen would her Bible.

Phillips and Taylor felt compelled to tackle the subject because, they write, they mourn that "something so integral and essential to ourselves [has] become so incidental, so implausible to us." Their analysis of why this might have happened, that a "competitive society based on winners and losers breeds unkindness," is interesting. But what I clung to was Phillips' use of psychoanalysis to bring our need for one another out of the dreary world of dogoodness or the murky annals of childhood pain and into the light of an evolved kindness that brings pleasure and adventure, intellectual and emotional possibility.

This was the motivation I needed. One incident that had already galvanized my desire to change was being the beneficiary of an almost ludicrously luxuriant act of kindness: Two friends, one after the other, put aside their hectic lives and installed themselves for two weeks each in a miserably hot Brooklyn house in August to care for two crying, bloated, oozing monsters— my newborn and me. They didn't want me to have to cope solo while my husband was working long hours.

I don't think I'm alone in perceiving that doing something for someone else—something considered outside of the bourgeois goals we set for ourselves these days—is considered outside of "life." But my experience of my friends in those weeks was what I wanted life to be. My memories of their company are as vivid as those of my baby's first months. The level of intimacy I felt with them, in my desperate state, the evidence of a solid ground still out there that they represented, was an intense, hitherto unexperienced pleasure for me. I was awful to be with at the time, and for women not yet interested in having babies themselves, there had to be little appeal to the scene. I would not ever, ever have asked for such help. How did they know I needed it, and them, so? Why were they willing? It said something miraculous to me and opened a door into the experiences I might have were I to change focus from my own displeasure and dark view.

For Phillips, kindness is not about being good, it's about dealing with our ambivalence and needs so as to be generous with others'. "Bearing other people's vulnerability— which means sharing in it imaginatively and practically without needing to get rid of it, to yank people out of it—entails being able to bear one's own," he writes.

Reading On Kindness made everything click. For me, sustaining the ambivalence in my interactions with others is a hard and constant fight—the ability to simultaneously hold in my mind two terrifying ideas—"I need you to exist" and "I can exist without you." This last is scary because "I can exist without you," taken to its logical conclusion, means, "I might have to, if you should die." Over and over in my life, in minor and major ways, I've turned this into an all-or-nothing equation.

But I've started making progress. One day recently, a friend called to ask if I needed her to attend a party I was hosting. She was at the beach and didn't want to drive three hours into the city. Whereas in the past I might have responded with stilted hostility and then begun to write her off, this time I said that her being there was important to me, and that while it was hard not to take her balking as uncaring, I knew my interpretation might be incorrect.

She said it wasn't that at all and apologized for causing drama. I replied that I was sad but that I genuinely didn't want her to go out of her way. What I didn't say was that I'd planned to wear a dress she'd given me to the party, and I thought for a second of not wearing it. Then I realized that was mean-spirited. I wore the dress. And she showed up. This made me very happy. Neither of us acknowledged it, but I could see she was pleased I was wearing her dress.

Ideally, I'd have been able to express my feelings with a less anguished edge and simultaneously remember that my need for her, when I had lots of other guests, wasn't so great as to be worth massively inconveniencing her (she had driven hours, with a hangover, too). It was a small victory, but with a long-term payoff. By her listening to my feelings, and subsequently doing the nice thing, and by my accepting the gesture gratefully instead of shamefully (as it had exposed my neediness), the two of us reached a new level of trust. Next time, I won't be wounded if she can't come.

But then I fell off the wagon, in what feels like a spectacular failure, which is why I have called Phillips. I was at my brother's wedding in Montreal. He'd chosen for his family to stay at a seedy hotel in a brutalist '70s concrete tower next to the Greyhound bus depot. Although my mother insisted he hadn't done it intentionally, I was furious. I needed a vacation and was looking forward to this wedding in part providing one. Despite telling myself that I must not complain, I did nothing but the entire weekend, and even let my feelings be known to my brother on his wedding day.

Phillips immediately gets what happened. "Family relationships are going to be the habit of a lifetime, the most difficult to change," he says. "No one is going to have a lobotomy." Not complaining about the hotel might have been too big a demand on my evolving kindness skills. "There might be smaller ways you can be kinder to your brother that are more within your range. The risk is that otherwise one sets up a standard that makes one continually fail—as though one is unconsciously proving to oneself that one really isn't that kind."

Phillips reminds me that we are ambivalent about siblings, and that the goal is not to become a wholly kind person. "No, no, that can't be done," he insists. "The project is not to believe that the truth about oneself is one's anger. The truth is ambivalence. One is always going to have aggressive feelings, partly because if someone can satisfy you, they can also frustrate you."

This year, I again helped organize the block party, but I was much less controlling about it—I let people surprise me, and they did, bringing out the grills I'd forgotten to ask for, procuring huge amounts of great home-cooked food, and staying out for hours, even in the rain. Before dinner, a usually tense and stringent woman gently took my hand—the intimacy of the gesture sent mysterious waves of pleasure through me—and with the kindest, almost girlish, expression, said, "Shall we eat?" I shrugged. "Of course." And she said, "But we're all waiting for you."

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